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How should teachers insure students perform? Give me the right to take away their cell phones and we might get somewhere!! I posted earlier that I think we need recess in high school just so we can take it away if kids are behind in school work. We need things we can do. As things are, there is very little I can do if a student is not doing their work. I can talk to them but I have no real power besides grading and if kids don't care about grades, that is worthless. I can call home but we have grades posted on line so parents should already be aware that their student isn't doing their work so that's pointless.

I thought kids were not suppose to have cell phones in school. My son had his taken away twice. Both times I had to come to the school to pick it up. Also, both times it was kept for a week. I had no problem with this. The rules are the rules.

I think recess is a good idea too. My daughter just graduated 5th grade where they stopped taking recess, but luckily her teacher would still take them out into the field after lunch if the weather was nice.

The high school around here has one semester of PE and that is all that is required. BUT, is that the teachers fault, the parents fault, or the administration?

well, it doesnt really matter what your mindset is as long as you do it. thats why parents play such an important role. they make you do it.

A parent can make the kid do homework but cant make the kid get good grades. My parents wanted me to get good grades but i cant recall how many times i put random letters down for multiple choice questions or wrote "i dont care" or "shouldnt you already know?" in the blanks. I made A's and B's all the way to high school. After that it was "why should I get A's when a D- is still a passing grade? All a parent can do is just come to the realization that some kids just dont really care at all. I didnt. It was pointed out to me that if i didnt get good grades then i wouldn't amount to anything in life and I was okay with that. Some people dont see anything wrong with flipping burgers for 50 years. I can honestly say that no job offer ever depended on my ability to diagram a sentence or point to Vietnam on a map.

A parent can make the kid do homework but cant make the kid get good grades. My parents wanted me to get good grades but i cant recall how many times i put random letters down for multiple choice questions or wrote "i dont care" or "shouldnt you already know?" in the blanks. I made A's and B's all the way to high school. After that it was "why should I get A's when a D- is still a passing grade? All a parent can do is just come to the realization that some kids just dont really care at all. I didnt. It was pointed out to me that if i didnt get good grades then i wouldn't amount to anything in life and I was okay with that. Some people dont see anything wrong with flipping burgers for 50 years. I can honestly say that no job offer ever depended on my ability to diagram a sentence or point to Vietnam on a map.

See, right there is why I don't think school should be compulsory beyond a certain age and/or certain minimal mastery of reading and basic math -- the four functions plus fractions and percentages (essentially everything before algebra).

Just full disclosure, Pythonis -- I am indeed one of those intellectual snobs, but the fact of the matter is, NO, just as college is not for everyone, neither is school beyond a certain point. We need brain surgeons, sure -- and we also need folks to flip burgers. I don't agree that flipping burgers automatically equals not amounting to anything in life, particularly if you're happy and satisfied with what you do. I think society is better off with ten happy burger-flippers than 100 miserable rocket scientists.

I thought kids were not suppose to have cell phones in school. My son had his taken away twice. Both times I had to come to the school to pick it up. Also, both times it was kept for a week. I had no problem with this. The rules are the rules.

I think recess is a good idea too. My daughter just graduated 5th grade where they stopped taking recess, but luckily her teacher would still take them out into the field after lunch if the weather was nice.

The high school around here has one semester of PE and that is all that is required. BUT, is that the teachers fault, the parents fault, or the administration?

Due to the fact that there have been incidents where students have had to call 911, our kids are allowed to have them but are not supposed to use them in class. However, I can't police the class and teach the class at the same time.

I'm referring to the power to ground them from their phones. If they gave me that power, I'm willing to bet you'd see grades go up in my class.

Kind of like what parents and students do on places like 'rate my teacher'?? It IS disgusting.

I hope people don't take these sites seriously. They say that when you're unhappy about something you tell 10 people but if you're happy you only tell 3. It's far more likely someone who is unhappy with their grade is posting on these sites.

And I don't care if I misspell a word when I'm typing fast. If you do some reasearch, you will find that that is common on BB's because people write the way they talk on a board and when we talk, we don't think about spelling or punctuation. Please stick to the topic. We all make typos. Pointing them out serves no purpose.[/quote]

Isn't that what teachers are suppose to do? I guess it's all us parents that write on forums making it acceptable to write incorrectly and have bad grammatical skills. Shame on us! It's all our fault that society and well spoken/written language has gone down to tubes.

This is way out of line.

Are teachers not allowed to have down time like every other profession?

My boyfriend is an IT specialist, he doesn't help every person he meets (online or otherwise) figure out how to use their iPhone, computer, wifi, whatever. Hell he has even had someone else fix his computer on occasion. How is that any different?

This is a forum about education, when teachers visit here, they are surely doing so on their own personal time. The idea that they should be held to some paragon of perfection 24/7 is down right ridiculous and shows how asinine this conversation has become.

Didn't you blame the parents for bad grades? If we are responsible to teach them properly why do we even have teachers?

No one is blaming you for the teaching, what is being laid at the feet of parents (and I would preface that with SOME parents) is the ability of students to learn. And lets be clear here, just because something is taught does not mean it was learned.

SOME parents (and arguing over how many is just semantics at this point) are not setting their children up to succeed. This is evident from everything from taking kids on vacation during school to not making sure they get a good breakfast. All of which sums to not making sure education is the primary goal of students.

At the same rate, EVERYONE in here needs to recognize a simple fact that the parents who visit this forum are not a representative population of parents at large. The reality is that parents who bother to post and read an education bulletin board are at one end of the parental bell curve, and the real problems at another.

What we are arguing about is how invested the middle majority are in the education of their children. Teachers are exposed to a much more typical subset of parents than individual parents are. The involved parents in this forum are likely to know and interact with the other involved parents in their schools and neighborhoods. This is giving them a skewed sense of parental involvement. At the same rate, teachers are much more likely to gripe about the smaller problem subset.

I thought kids were not suppose to have cell phones in school. My son had his taken away twice. Both times I had to come to the school to pick it up. Also, both times it was kept for a week. I had no problem with this. The rules are the rules.

I think recess is a good idea too. My daughter just graduated 5th grade where they stopped taking recess, but luckily her teacher would still take them out into the field after lunch if the weather was nice.

The high school around here has one semester of PE and that is all that is required. BUT, is that the teachers fault, the parents fault, or the administration?

If you are unhappy with the curriculum (such as PE only being a half year) blame your STATE. Curricula are not set by the schools, or the teachers.

Second, you do understand that different schools and states have different rules, right? For example my school, allows students to have their phones on them as long as they are not used in classes. They can use them as they like during lunch as long as they are not using them in anyway that violates the handbook.

Finally, just as a question, how did you punish your child for breaking the rules? How are you making sure your child is not bringing his phone to school?

The idea that a teacher is to blame for the education system failures is as silly as blaming the failure of the system solely on the parents.

Yet it is the parents who the OP and others on here are blaming. Read the title of the thread.

I've already admitted I'm not perfect and that I could probably do more to help my children succeed in school. As a parent, I will always feel I can do more in MANY areas of my children's life.

Why can't teachers admit the same? In fact, any teacher who feels like they are already doing all they can, and placing all the blame on parents, rather than looking at their teaching methods and constantly tweaking it so as to improve in their craft, is not, in my opinion, a good teacher.

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